Pegah Kazemi

Pegah Kazemi joined Culver-Stockton College as the Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Gallery Director in 2026. A painter and interdisciplinary artist, she teaches courses in figure drawing, drawing studio, intermediate and advanced painting, and professional portfolio, and oversees Mabee Gallery, bringing to both her teaching and her studio practice centered on the human form as what she calls “a dynamic object,” exploring cultural memory, identity, and the self.

Kazemi’s paintings and illustrations have been exhibited globally, appearing most recently in PROOF/Analog at River House Arts (2025) and profiled in the pages of Studio Visit Magazine, which featured her work in its Legacy section. Her international honors include the certificate of merit from the 16th Teatrio illustration exhibition in Italy, as well as recognition in the AXA Art Prize, presented in partnership with the New York Academy of Art at Wilkinson Gallery in New York City.

Kazemi’s artistic formation began in performance rather than paint, and she remains an active stage and screen actress. A longstanding presence in Tehran’s theatre circuit, she originated principal roles in avant-garde stagings of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and an adaptation of Hitchcock’s Rope, productions that toured to international festivals in Armenia and the Republic of Georgia. Since relocating to the United States, she has continued to work as a screen actress, appearing in short films including When a Circle Decides to Not Be a Circle Anymore, which had its international premiere at the Pharos Best Inspiration Film Festival in Greece, with new stage and screen projects forthcoming.

Kazemi’s training in painting was transnational. Her thesis work in Bonn—an inquiry into the phenomenology of the metallic object and the daily-use utensil—situated her early practice within a still-life tradition inherited from the Neue Sachlichkeit, privileging mimetic verisimilitude and a hyperrealist precision of surface. Her subsequent M.F.A. at Bowling Green State University turned this vocabulary toward the figure, where facture loosens into a more gestural abstract figurative expressionism and the body dissolves into passages of paint—a dialectic between the coolly rendered object and the urgently painted figure that continues to structure her work today.